Tengrism: Original Religion of all Turkic and Mongolic Peoples

In which God did the Turks actually believe before they accepted Islam? This is a question that I have often been asked by relatives, friends and you, the YouTube community. In the Turkic Book of Divination, which was written in the 9th century in East Asia, a certain name drops many times throughout the text: Tengri. This being is there described as the God of the Turks. It is him who the Turks – and other steppe peoples like the Mongols and Huns – prayed to before converting to other religions. Thus, the original religion of all Turkic peoples - i.e. the Anatolian Turks, Kazakhs, Tartars, Uighurs and so on - was Tengrism, a religious system built around its name-giver. But who was/is Tengri exactly? Weren’t the Turks and Mongols used to be Shamanists? Contrary to popular belief, these two peoples as well as many other ethnicities of the Eurasian Steppe were followers of Tengri, the omnipotent ruler of the eternal blue sky - as Genghis Khan once put it. The Shaman only played a marginal r